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The Architect and His Ordeal

Updated Nov. 9, 2004 12:01 a.m. ET

Never mind the cartoon hero of "The Fountainhead," Ayn Rand's novel about an architect of dominant will and artistic genius. The will and genius parts were true enough, but Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), the architect on whom Rand was said to have based her fictional character, was complicated and contradictory, a man of "many masks," as Brendan Gill put it in his 1987 biography.

Ada Louise Huxtable, The Wall Street Journal's architecture critic, has consulted Mr. Gill's work and many other biographies and studies to capture the architect and his time in "Frank Lloyd Wright" (Penguin Lives, 251 pages, $19.95), the newest entry in the Penguin Lives series. And of course she brings her own Pulitzer Prize-winning critical judgment to bear on the houses and buildings that Wright designed and constructed over a long career.

On Aug. 14, 1914, a fire badly damaged one of them -- Taliesin, Wright's home in southern Wisconsin. (Wright was away at the time.) A crazed servant had lit the fire and, wielding an ax, murdered most of its inhabitants. Among them was Wright's mistress, installed there at some distance from his wife and children in Oak Park, Ill. Herewith, an excerpt from Ms. Huxtable's account of the fire's aftermath:

"Every aspect of the tragedy had been exploited by the newspapers; those who knew nothing of [Wright's] architecture knew everything about the scandals and sorrows of his personal life. Mail came from all over, much of it sympathetic. He said he tied the letters in a bundle, unread, and burned them; it is more likely that they were screened first by his staff.

"But there was one letter that he read and responded to, written in a tone of such sensitive understanding that he became curious about the sender. The writer was a wealthy divorc&eacute;e, Maud Miriam Noel, who had been living in Paris as an expatriate and sculptor until the start of the First World War had forced her return. Miriam Noel, as she preferred to be known -- she had dropped the old-fashioned Maud -- was exactly the kind of cosmopolitan and 'liberated' woman Wright would find interesting and consoling, and he arranged to meet her at his Chicago office.

"He was immediately intrigued. She was a worldly woman of forty-five, two years younger than he was, and far more attractive than he had expected. Like Wright, she was a master of self-image. Her dress was 'artistic' in the current mode; she favored turbans, scarves, ropes of beads and furs adorning long gowns and wraps. She wore and played with a monocle as they spoke, smoked cigarettes, which he helped her light, and exuded an air of sophistication and mystery that was only heightened when she spoke of a 'luckless' love affair, which immediately struck a symbiotic note with his own unhappiness.

"Miriam Noel has been described as pretty, with an expressive face and large eyes. In photographs she is of average, rather than striking, appearance, round-faced, with eyes too close together for beauty; the softness of expression in early likenesses becomes grim and humorless in later pictures. She clearly cultivated personal drama. What Wright saw in her was a lively intelligence, a shared interest in literature and art, and a conviction, matching his, that they were above the crowd in their aesthetic sensibilities.

"There were also intimations of passion and the allure of the eternal feminine mystique. She professed to see in him genius, feeling, and taste. What he did not see was that she took drugs, was emotionally unstable and given to wild mood swings, subject to unreasoning anger and irrational acts of vengeance. Only later did Wright perceive her psychotic personality. Today she would be considered schizophrenic. Her eccentricity would escalate to the point where her behavior became so destructive and demoralizing that his life 'seemed paralyzed by subtle poison,' he would write in the Autobiography. Most of all, as Neil Levine has surmised so perceptively of this meeting, 'they saw in each other a companion in misery.'

"They were, in fact, to make each other miserable for the next seven or eight years."